Ha-Ha for the Bohemians

The Banquet Years. By Roger Shattuck. (Faber,' 36s.)

THERE is always something vaguely suspect in Anglo-Saxon enthusiasm for la vie de Boheme. . When the Anglo-Saxons in question happen to ; be university teachers it is worse still. A company of wild but talented fellows only pausing from their creative exertions in order to play practical jokes on the crass bourgeoisie—this myth seems guaranteed to send a glow of vicarious warmth through every academic heart. How the profes- sors relish every moment of Bohemian jollity, how they overestimate every squib and cracker produced by their heroes. Their minds are wide , open; there will be no misunderstood Rimbauds laid to their account if they can help it; rather than reject the eccentric they will accept the ; phoney, and, if their criticism is to become phoney in its turn, this is a small sacrifice to make for the sake of what Ukridge called 'the broad, t flexible outlook.' The result is admiration of t, shady behaviour and bullying arrogance as the indispensable symptoms of genius and an un- t. loge; critical acceptance of the artist's slightest antics swhnich comes perilously near to being condescen- If io These somewhat irascible reflections are in- had duced by a reading of The Banquet Years. The

book is described as 'The Origins of the Avant- “bou Garde in France,' and it mostly consists of four aduli studies dealing with one painter, the Douanier Rousseau, one musician, Erik Satie, and two writers, Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire. I Professor Shattuck has clearly done a great deal of work on his four subjects, trying to elucidate

their tangled biographies and producing a sort of Th_ catalogue ralsonne of their numerous and I v heterogeneous works. This is a useful book for pi

anyone interested in its period. It collects a large its number of facts which have not been collected t

before, and quite a few myths as well. one But, this once said, I found it an infuriating book. To begin with, there is Professor Shattuck's / 11$ brightly adjectival style which ranges from

the rumbustious to the incomprehensible. He t I writes of Salle: 'He already had a suitably fabled Nind room . . . rigged up with a system of locks and transoms to allow light and air to enter from c.

the landing and keep out prying looks.' In so far as I can make this out, it appears to mean that boak the musician had a lock on his door and a skylight trait over it, but to put it like that would not perhaps have been sufficiently 'fabled' for Professor Shat- tuck's purpose. Or take his comment on the

monkey, Bosse-de-Nage, the companion of Jarry's is no

Dr. Faustroll 'The monkey's meaningless and

all-meaning "ha-ha" brings out the principle of W(Irci true dialogue: that each speech must actively there

outstrip the last and not merely acknowledge what has gone before.' This seems to me about as meaningless and all-meaning as any `ha-ha' or, for that matter, as any monkey.

Underlying this book is a mixture of preten- tiousness and naiveté which strikes one by turns as banal and obscure. Professor Shattuck's attempt

to make of Rousseau, Satie, Jarry and Apollinaire the founding fathers of modernity is in itself a worse confounding of the already confused cultural history of the period. Apollinaire, in- deed, was an accurate reflector of trends. He did not create any 'modern' movement, but he did realise it was taking place. However, he is likely to be remembered as a lyric poet of a type which appears traditional when compared with, say, Reverdy or even the early St. John Perse. Rousseau was a good painter, but almost any of half a dozen great names has a better title to be considered as precursor or founder of the school of contemporary French painting. Jarry was an eccentric who in Ubu Roi did produce a remark- able premonition of what came afterwards with Dada and the Surrealists, but whose importance 11 strictly limited. Of Satie I cannot speak, but Professor Shattuck does not seem to me to have made out a case for considering him as the well- spring of modern French music. The claims made for these founding four in The Banquet Years are usually exaggerated and some- times exaggerated to the point of absurdity. We might just admit that 'the banquet years began to search out a new canon of thought and a new structure of expression,' but to be told in a foot- note that 'Only one other equally far-reaching attempt to recast the operation of the human mind has been made within the central cultural tradi- tion of the West' is a little too much. And when 11 turns out that this previous revolution con- sisted of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises it is. hard 10 know whether to laugh or weep. Professor Shattuck seems to have accepted sense and non- sense, fact and fiction, real life and play-acting, Philosophy and Rosicrucianism as existing on exactly the same level, to have gathered them together behind a smokescreen of obscurity and called the resulting pea-souper a book.

If I were feeling in a vindictive mood, I might quote some of his translations, which are very bad, or elaborate on the appalling coyness with which he sketches the Parisian social scene round about 1900—`the only barrier to rampant adultery was the whalebone corset.'

ANTHONY HARTLEY